


Ruins

by LookingForDroids



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Ancestor-Era (Homestuck), Doom, Ficlet, Introspection, M/M, POV Second Person, So Much Doom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-27
Updated: 2020-02-27
Packaged: 2021-02-28 04:42:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22928152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LookingForDroids/pseuds/LookingForDroids
Summary: The Signless sees what was; Psii carries the weight of what will be. For a time, resting in the heart of a desert, they manage to find peace in what is.
Relationships: The Psiioniic | The Helmsman/The Signless | The Sufferer
Comments: 2
Kudos: 20





	Ruins

The moons hang low over the desert, shedding plentiful light, but even in the shelter of the rocks, it’s cold. The Signless has stoked the fire high with dry brush gathered on your journey, and you lean toward the blaze, thankful for the warmth and the few hours of darkness left before you need to retreat to the shelter of the caves. The Disciple is sleeping with her head in his lap and his hand in her hair, uncomfortably and unselfconsciously intimate; you’ve seen her tear a drone open with only her claws, but right now, she’s curled up and content, with a rumble in her chest that sounds a lot like a purr, and you don’t want to disturb her. The Signless’s strange troll lusus is keeping watch, and waiting to see the sunrise like some kind of lunatic, which leaves him and you and more silence than either of you are comfortable with. You don’t know what you’re doing, attaching yourself to this cullbait messiah. There’s doom hanging on him like the cloak he wears, and it’s a mantle broad enough to cover any that follow him. You haven’t stopped being aware of that. You just decided, somewhere along the line and for reasons still unclear to you, that you don’t care.

The Signless picks up a handful of sand from the ground between you and rubs a few grains pensively between his fronds.

“There was a city here,” he says. Maybe it’s true and maybe it’s not; you believe that he believes it, and right now, that’s good enough for you. “It wasn’t always desert. There were streets lined with trees, and there was a fountain – just there, in the center of the square – and a couple of kids who liked to skate along the edge of it. You know what a skateboard is?”

“Some highblood toy?” you guess. You don’t really care. Fuck skateboards. You want to hear more about the city, and the people who lived there.

“Doesn’t matter,” he says. “I’m just talking to hear the sound of my own fucking voice.”

“Yeah, I’ve noticed that’s a thing you do,” you say, because even messiahs need to be given some shit from time to time, but instead of taking the bait, he just stirs the fire with a piece of wood, sending up eddies of sparks and ashes.

“What happened?” you ask. But as you speak, you realize that you don’t want to know, and that you already do. Some of the sand here, in the places where nothing grows, has the texture of glass worn smooth by sweeps upon sweeps of wind and time. Orbital bombardment could do that, or some still greater calamity. You know your way around calamities – _you will be witness to more of them yet,_ your prophet’s certainty warns you – and Alternia has seen war enough to supply any number of worlds with deserts where cities used to be. The only difference is in the details.

The Signless sighs and opens his hand, letting the sand slip into the wind. He would tell you that the details matter, and so, while you’re with him, they do.

“What happens to all of us, one way or another,” he says. “But while it stood, it was...”

He trails off, lost in what might be memory, until you touch his open palm. He smiles at you and down at the Disciple with the same fierce, deliberate candor, then takes your hand and moves it to rest against his leg, just an inch away from the dusty tangle of her hair. You sit there like an idiot for a moment, just feeling the heat of the fire and the warmth of his thigh beneath the back of your hand, and instead of _just in case you didn’t realize, we’re all going to get fucked hard in the chagrin tunnel by history,_ you hear yourself say, “Cities can be built again.”

You don’t want to tell him that this one won’t be. Even with his eyes turned to the past, it’s the future he believes in; he gives himself up to a wiggler’s blind hope that things won’t be shit forever, and faith without proof is just ignorance, but there’s something in you that recoils from being the one to kill it. And it’s not just his stupid, pitiable blunt teeth and nubby horns and the impossibility of his blood. It’s that he tells stories and believes them, and when he talks, you can almost see what he sees – the moonlit square and the kids and the fountain, the ghosts all crowding around as they go about their lives, insubstantial and all the heavier for it. Whoever they were, they’re gone, and you find yourself reeling beneath the weight of doom past and still to be. You think maybe you’re shivering, despite the fire. You must be, because the next thing you know, the Signless is letting go of your hand so he can haul you close enough to spread his cloak over both of you.

The weight eases, with two of you to bear it, and as you lean into the transitory warmth of the Signless your side, there’s a sudden stark comfort in knowing that sooner or later, everything ends.

Just like he did, you pick up a handful of sand and hold it for a moment, feeling the grit of it against your palm: troll bones and concrete, pieces of history, worlds that never were and never will be again.

 _Sand to glass. Trees to vapor._ Maybe sometime in the future, someone will be along to remember you.

Just like he did, you let it go.


End file.
